Friday on the beaches of Normandy, where 70 years ago American military forces and their allies stormed ashore to loosen Nazi Germany’s grip on Western Europe, world leaders will gather to look back at all that was won and lost on D-Day.

Eleven San Diego State University students and their professor will be there, too — looking forward.

They’re taking lessons from that epic World War II encounter, the largest amphibious and airborne assault in history, and applying them to the post 9/11 world.

Lessons in coalition politics. Lessons in military strategy. Lessons in leadership and accountability. Lessons in working with insurgents. And lessons in luck or fate or whatever it is that often plays a role in the way things turn out.

“Going there allows them to get that visceral sense of what it was all about,” said Jeffrey McIllwain, the professor. “They walk it, they smell it, they see it.”

The students are working toward master’s degrees in SDSU’s graduate program in Homeland Security, the first of its kind in the nation outside the military academies. The program is designed to produce leaders in various fields — the military, public health, intelligence, science, journalism, politics — who can respond to terrorist attacks and other major emergencies.

They’ve gone to France for two weeks as part of a summer course called “The Lessons and Legacies of D-Day.” They’ve toured museums and memorials, walked in American, British and German cemeteries, met people who were in the French resistance during the war.

They can’t help but wonder about the past, and the future.

“Today liberal democracies are drifting to a pre-World War II preference for isolationism,” J.D. Hodges, one of the students, said in an email interview from France. “It is understandable that the United States and its allies are war weary after more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pulling back appears reasonable as a result.

“Whether the world will be safer or more free remains to be seen. But standing here on the beaches of Normandy, it is painfully clear that the sacrifice of free nations is the only thing that keeps totalitarian ideologies at bay.”

Forgotten risks

The trip cost each of the students about $5,000. They arrived in France on May 24 having already read some of the leading books about D-Day, including Max Hastings’ “Overlord” and Douglas Brinkley’s “The Boys of Pointe du Hoc.” They’d seen key movies and TV series: “The Longest Day,” “Band of Brothers.”

So they understand the sweep of the invasion and how it turned out to be one of the war’s great triumphs, the beginning of the end for Hitler. They understand what McIllwain calls The Spielberg Paradox: “The strong must be willing to endure the carnage seen in ‘Saving Private Ryan’ to stop the killing of the weak seen in ‘Schindler’s List.’”

But what often gets forgotten, McIllwain told the students in a classroom session several days before they left, is how difficult and risky the operation was. It had been two years in the planning, and much was riding on the element of surprise — the Germans knew an invasion was coming, but not when or where. They’d spread fortifications all along the coast facing the English Channel.